In an existing network, one data center includes n equipment rooms, and one equipment room includes n racks, where a location of a rack is generally fixed. One switch (generally the switch is not changed) is installed on the top of each rack. Each network device on the rack is directly or indirectly connected to the top-of-rack switch to communicate with an external network. As a scale of the data center and the equipment room continuously increases, the number of various network devices continuously increases. When a network device becomes faulty during network device management, a physical location of the faulty network device generally needs to be quickly and accurately identified.
To resolve the foregoing problem, a manner of manually planning is used in the prior art, including segmenting Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, allocating segmented IP addresses to the equipment rooms, further segmenting the IP addresses of the equipment rooms, allocating segmented IP addresses to different racks according to an order, sorting network devices on a same rack according to an order of values of IP addresses, and finally, saving a plan related to the IP addresses and physical locations to a database or depicting the plan on a drawing. When a network device of a specified IP address needs to be found, a physical location of the device is found according to information in the database or the drawing.
It can be seen that planning, recording, and saving of an IP address and a physical location in the foregoing process are all manually performed. Therefore, a manual workload is heavy.